Wrapping Up the Winter Growing Season

The 2nd and 5th graders have been hard at work in the garden for the past five weeks. The 2nd grade classes have been focusing on the themes of camouflage and fossils both in the classroom and in the garden. The kids went on a camouflage butterfly hunt, examined the garden for lady bugs and preying mantids, and even made camouflaged masks that helped them blend into their favorite garden spots. Try and find our students hidden in the broccoli rabe!

2nd Graders Testing Out Their Camouflage Masks

On top of camouflaging with the garden, the 2nd graders have also been learning about fossils and conducting in their own fossil excavations as paleontologists in the garden! The children were each able to excavate their own homemade fossil from the soil and record their findings like real scientists.

The 5th grade students finished up their final garden classes as students at 24th Street Elementary this week. On top of building beautiful pea trellises out of bamboo and twine, the 5th graders also helped to design, amend and plant over 40 strawberry plants into the new berry patch!

5th Grade Pea Trellises Made of Bamboo and Twine

The departure of the 5th grade students this week is bittersweet, but we know they will enter middle school as the top environmental stewards of their class!

In our garden classroom, we are always looking for ways to minimize waste and recycle resources back into the garden. For example, if our cooking class has food scraps left over, our way of recycling them is to feed them to the worms to turn into rich compost for our garden beds. But what if we don't have worms at home? Are there recipes we can cook that utilize the entire ingredient and don't leave scraps? Why, yes!

Nasturtiums are one of our favorite things growing in the garden! They don't need much attention to thrive and yet they still provide the garden with vibrant reds, oranges, yellows and greens. In addition to being beautiful, both nasturtium flowers AND leaves are edible! You can add the nasturtium's peppery flavor to many things, but one of the tastiest ways to eat nasturtiums is in pesto! This pesto can be a spread in sandwiches, used as a sauce for your pasta, a marinade on chicken or fish, or a fun addition to your breakfast eggs! Try to pick the smaller, dark green leaves for this as they have the biggest peppery flavor.